Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

I'm stuck at square 1 but increasingly unable to boot.

Is there a list we can/did make of techniques that we're using to get our units booting up into the iGPU?

I have been stuck for the better part of the week trying everything that I can think of to get booted.

Want to still give it a try while I speak with repair shops.

I would not have had it repaired if I would have seen this topic earlier...

I have the Early 2011 i7 2.0 AMD6490 model, it did the blue death 2-3 months ago. It was the GPU's fault indeed, I was able to boot after a couple of attempts, then switch with gfxCardStatus to the IntelHD3000.

...and magic, all of the sudden freezes have stopped. I went to the local store, and they resurrected it for 160 000 HUF, (535€). Today I played some Killing Floor, and when I changed the resolution, the screen began to flash in distorted purple. I went back to the main menu, and the problem disappeared. I'm beginning to worry about this again...

Not to mention how much frustration was it before. They need to do something about this.

A sad customer from Hungary.

gpu freeze wrote:

 

well, I am thinking of ``bake my mac''

http://russell.heistuman.com/2010/04/27/cooking-the-books-or-baking-my-macbook-p ro-logic-board/

I'd urge you to reconsider.  If you were just talking about trying to get a few more months out of an older laptop or gaming console with a current value of $100 or so, I wouldn't try to talk you out of it (though even then I'd shy away from a home-brew solution that didn't mention the use of flux).  But the value of these 2011 MBP i7 Quads still justifies the expense of a legitimate repair. 

BTW, 16 months later, the same person writes about his "Seventh MacbookPro Bake":

http://russell.heistuman.com/2011/08/30/heptacular-seventh-bake-today/

He says that each bake will last for "at least six months," but the math doesn't really work out on that claim, does it?

Swampus wrote:

 

gpu freeze wrote:

 

well, I am thinking of ``bake my mac''

http://russell.heistuman.com/2010/04/27/cooking-the-books-or-baking-my-macbook-p ro-logic-board/

 

I'd urge you to reconsider.  If you were just talking about trying to get a few more months out of an older laptop or gaming console with a current value of $100 or so, I wouldn't try to talk you out of it (though even then I'd shy away from a home-brew solution that didn't mention the use of flux).  But the value of these 2011 MBP i7 Quads still justifies the expense of a legitimate repair. 

 

BTW, 16 months later, the same person writes about his "Seventh MacbookPro Bake":

http://russell.heistuman.com/2011/08/30/heptacular-seventh-bake-today/

 

He says that each bake will last for "at least six months," but the math doesn't really work out on that claim, does it?

I agree with this.

A much better, easier, and safer way to do a DIY reflow is with a heat gun.

I recently did a reflow on my old/dead 2008 MBP that died right after my early 2011.
I used it for over a month while my 2011 MBP was being repaired.

All you do is remove the logic board, heat only the GPU(both sides) evenly, and monitor the temperatures with an IR thermometer.  I believe the common reflow temp is around 350-400 degrees F(180-200 C)

A Cheap heat gun and IR thermometer should be able to be obtained for about $50 or so.

http://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.php

Here is mine....

This is my MBP's info from www.appleserialnumberinfo.com

Add this to the RIP list lol. Still thinking of my choices.

Might go for a reball somewhere.

Started acting weird in the beginning of november.

Last year had a new SSD installed, superdrive removed and replaced with original hard drive.

Running fine on integrated card for 3 weeks thanks to GFXcardstatus, Apple quoted me the 600$ logic board replacement. Will not take the risk of another faulty board; waiting for Apple to aknowledge the problem...

My journey with my Macbook Pro Early 2011 GPU ISSUE?

I first had issues starting mid October 2013

• horizontal lines and crash while using Apeture, was running Mountain Lion.
• 1st hard reboot unsuccesful, ended in gray screen, fans at full speed after a couple of minutes.
• would try a restart again and the computer usually would start up after 2-5 tries.
• started trouble shooting for an Apeture fix, rebuilt database several times, reinstalled original RAM
• Still problems, obviously.
• Bought a new solid state drive, did a clean install with Mavericks OSX as it was just released.
• Computer had been running really fast and beautifully, but I had not been doing anything that was related to high perfomance graphic work.
• After about two weeks everything worked pretty well.
• And then after reinstalling everything, a few programs or drivers caused some issues. One driver I remember causing issues was Intous Wacom 4 driver, so I unistalled it.
• Last week my computer started freezing when I awoke it, after it had gone to sleep. The screen stayed dark although you could see a faint frozen image of the screen. I then had to do a hard reboot and the apple logo would come up and then the screen would go to all gray, and the fans would rev up. Again it would take me several tries to sucessfully boot up. Many times the screen would shift to the right on boot up. The computer would freeze 3-4 times a day when I awoke it from sleeping, but was not geting the horizontal lines, yet.
• Three days ago I open Apeture and there were the horizonal lines, computer crashed like it did when this all started.
• I again went back to my original RAM
• Computer crashed again when I hooked it up to an external monitor, image shifted across the screen and there were the horizontal lines again.
• Rebooted a couple of times, read through this entire thread, and a couple of others about the GPU issues, found something on running the ColorSync utility, ran profile first aid, it found some issues and repaired 2 of them, although there were 4 adobe issues it could not fix.
• I installed gfx card status at this time as well.
• After running Colorsync first aid, my computer stopped crashing from awaking it from sleep mode.
• My computer has not crashed for a couple of days and I have been doing some testing doing some high performance activies such as photo editing in Apeture and Photoshop. Also tested a google Hangout hooked up to an external monitor. Both activies were probably less then 15 minutes.
• Been keeping my computer (gfxCardStatus) on Integrate only, most of the time, but used dynamic switching for the tests I did yesterday.

Just thought I would share this, I am sure I am missing some info but I believe this is a pretty good summary of what has been happening. Not sure if running the Color Sync first aid was what helped my out but I have been crash free since doing so. Time will tell.

-Andy

Fixed with 10.9.1 update?

Early 2011 MBP 17 inch with OWC SSD and 16 gigs of OWC ram.

The week I installed Mavericks I started getting problems where the display would freeze, lines on the screen, computer getting stuck on the gray screen, install disk going to a blue screen.

I'm an Apple Developer and just installed the prerelease 10.9.1 update, and now using gfxCardStatus I can switch to Discrete Graphics without any crashes. I even started using my Thunderbolt display again, and I can put the machine to sleep over and over without it freezing.  Time will tell if my machine crashes or freezes again, but this is hopeful.

The update on the developer portal side says it contains a graphics drivers issue, but when you get the update on the app store it does not.

I'm also getting this message now when I switch between the two different graphics cards.

11/22/13 11:22:30.076 AM WindowServer[92]: CGXMuxAcknowledge: Posting glitch less acknowledge

Good luck!

I have the same problem and the same computer, then a I sent a email to media.help@apple.com, they answered me the same day.

I called on the phone and spoke to a person who took care of my problem, and told me to take him to the engineers so that they ascertain that this model of MacBook have problems. If so we may have a repair plan.

they will respond next week, but the more they complain that we will surely there are more possibilities.

Same thing happen to me, few days after I installed Mavericks the problems started. After a week of different attempts I got it back working but three days after using it took a dump again. So I decided to go more agresive and baked the logic board. At first I have to addmit I was afraid to end up with a melted piece of "logic" apple junk, but didn't work anyway so it was worth the risk. So I preheat the oven at 325 degrees and let it cook for 8 min. and to my surprise it works perfectly. Time will tell how long will last this approach.

Any update?  Are you 4+ weeks and still running without previous problems? 

Also you said that you'd "turned off graphics switching in the energy saver", which means that you're using the AMD discrete GPU (high performance graphics) all the time, yes?

I posted a similar post a second ago, but it got deleted by the mods for "unsolicited content." Whoops, my bad on that.

I'll try again with different wording.

Besides submitting feedback to Apple, which all of us should do, (http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html) Good, way to get their attention.

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